ED PALM | Perhaps not noble, but not ashamed

In an especially resonant scene in Tim O’Brien’s surrealistic novel “Going After Cacciato,” a squad of hitchhiking soldiers who had walked away from the war in Vietnam are picked up by a member of the counterculture, a San Diego State dropout, driving a VW van. The soldiers are actually on a mission to bring back the deserter Cacciato, but she assumes they are taking a principled stand against what she characterizes as “The Evil”: “Children getting toasted, the orphans, atrocities,” as she characterizes it. “God, the guilt must be awful,” she concludes. After stealing her van and leaving the girl by the roadside, one of the soldiers concedes that “sometimes I feel a little guilt.”